[I} … lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows[1]
Simon Kirby
Putuo District, Shanghai
April 2009
Robert Davis’ work has been characterized to date by the postcard sized collage works, or ‘Journal Series’: intricately layered over-workings of text, personal correspondence, found images, crayon, pencil, watercolor and paper. Originally instigated by William Wells, the legendary founder of the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, the first Journal Series was commissioned as a cycle of postaldiaries to be ‘sent home’ to Davis’ exhibiting gallery in Philadelphia, USA.
The Journal works naturally treated intensely personal subjects and this new form soon took on a very portable life of its own. Over the following eight years the technique became the focus of continuous research and refinement. Jewel-like in a way that is characteristic of the miniature, the Journal Series are layered narrative episodes that chronicle the artist’s passage through time: entomological research, diabetic coma and public admission, longing, falling in love, loss and even blankness. They become like domestic interiors, fully embellished with the symbols or makers to the artist’s experience. In this way Davis managed to imbue paper, pigment and gum with palpable, bared emotion.
In the current show the four postcard-sized untitled collage works formally follow the narrative structure of the earlier Journal pieces but they make significant new departures. In these pieces the narratives have become more oblique, they refer more consistently to the natural world, to water and to journeys. The ‘home’ to which these postcards where originally intended to be sent appears to be dwindling into the distance. It is viewed for the first time from the outside: a little cuboid house, sometimes windowless, that is somehow like the North American stone cottage at Moganshan to which the artist returned alone for a second Thanksgiving in 2008 and where these works were completed.
These untitled collage works also anticipate the themes of a major new departure: Davis has launched for the first time a series of full sized multi-media canvas painting works. This is a leaving behind of the comfort of the intimate, minitiarsed tapestries in which all the elements everything are contained, interpreted and over-worked into potentially vast unmapped sky-like spaces. Untrammelled and yet in which every last mark on the surface has unavoidable potential significance.
Clear homage is made to two of the great American painters of the 20th Century: the incomparable Cy Twombley and Davis’ personal painting mentor, William T Wyley. Two Shanghai’s artists also make a very welcome appearance: the veteran and hugely creative Li Shan and one of the city’s painter’s painter, Zhang Hong.
The theme of struggle is ever-present. Davis’ migrants in A Great Contributionare depicted as the naked Tujia minority who endlessly haul river craft upstream against the Yangtze current.
Internal or interpersonal struggle is reprised in The North Atlantic Drift; referring to the global weather pattern which perpetually scuds warm wind and rain eastwards from the American coast towards the shores of Britain and Western Europe. The North Atlantic Drift features a tiny image of two men, handcuffed to each other yet facing different directions. They are suspended in a region of blue wondering shadows that irresistibly call to mind the one great English painter JMW Turner.
[1] From W E B Dubois: The Souls of Black Folk. 1903.
Discoveries Robert Davis
[I} … lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows[1]
Simon Kirby
Putuo District, Shanghai
April 2009
Robert Davis’ work has been characterized to date by the postcard sized collage works, or ‘Journal Series’: intricately layered over-workings of text, personal correspondence, found images, crayon, pencil, watercolor and paper. Originally instigated by William Wells, the legendary founder of the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, the first Journal Series was commissioned as a cycle of postaldiaries to be ‘sent home’ to Davis’ exhibiting gallery in Philadelphia, USA.
The Journal works naturally treated intensely personal subjects and this new form soon took on a very portable life of its own. Over the following eight years the technique became the focus of continuous research and refinement. Jewel-like in a way that is characteristic of the miniature, the Journal Series are layered narrative episodes that chronicle the artist’s passage through time: entomological research, diabetic coma and public admission, longing, falling in love, loss and even blankness. They become like domestic interiors, fully embellished with the symbols or makers to the artist’s experience. In this way Davis managed to imbue paper, pigment and gum with palpable, bared emotion.
In the current show the four postcard-sized untitled collage works formally follow the narrative structure of the earlier Journal pieces but they make significant new departures. In these pieces the narratives have become more oblique, they refer more consistently to the natural world, to water and to journeys. The ‘home’ to which these postcards where originally intended to be sent appears to be dwindling into the distance. It is viewed for the first time from the outside: a little cuboid house, sometimes windowless, that is somehow like the North American stone cottage at Moganshan to which the artist returned alone for a second Thanksgiving in 2008 and where these works were completed.
These untitled collage works also anticipate the themes of a major new departure: Davis has launched for the first time a series of full sized multi-media canvas painting works. This is a leaving behind of the comfort of the intimate,
minitiarsed tapestries in which all the elements everything are contained, interpreted and over-worked into potentially vast unmapped sky-like spaces. Untrammelled and yet in which every last mark on the surface has unavoidable potential significance.
Clear homage is made to two of the great American painters of the 20th Century: the incomparable Cy Twombley and Davis’ personal painting mentor, William T Wyley. Two Shanghai’s artists also make a very welcome appearance: the veteran and hugely creative Li Shan and one of the city’s painter’s painter, Zhang Hong.
Davis’ full-scale painting works have developed a more loose narrative structure than the Journal pieces. The departure points are provided, as before, with recognizable graphic images – drawings, cartoons or pieces of text. However, these larger works are also now
The theme of struggle is ever-present. Davis’ migrants in A Great Contributionare depicted as the naked Tujia minority who endlessly haul river craft upstream against the Yangtze current.
referring to the global weather pattern which perpetually scuds warm wind and rain eastwards from the American coast towards the shores of Britain and Western Europe. The North Atlantic Drift features a tiny image of two men, handcuffed to each other yet facing different directions. They are suspended in a region of blue wondering shadows that irresistibly call to mind the one great English painter JMW Turner.
[1] From W E B Dubois: The Souls of Black Folk. 1903.
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